falling from the sky that should have burned
by martianwitchery
Summary: "You know where you're going. You can pretend that you're wandering, or that you're sleepwalking, or that some supernatural force has gripped your body and is pulling you by a thread, and maybe it has and is—but you know." Supermartian. M'gann-centric. Post-most of Endgame.


**A/N: lovingly alternatively titled "go the fuck to sleep" because it's about M'gann (and Conner) needing to go the fuck to sleep and was worked on primarily on occasions when I should have been going the fuck to sleep (secondarily on occasions when I was mildly intoxicated, which is like needing to go the fuck to sleep). I'm a method actor, what can I say. Set somewhere in that two-week-ish period between Wally's death and the last Team/League scene of the show. Warnings for mentions of canonical character death, grief, and nightmares.**

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><p>There are too many buttons and switches in the Watchtower, you decide, rubbing a willfully dry eye. Too many potential alarms to be set off. You could phase through the back doors of the cafeteria with ease now, you remind yourself, but with all those automated systems wired into the walls and ovens, you know you'd trip something. The potential of that kind of slip-up is more easily managed on missions, behind enemy territory—you shift easily from stealth to head-on confrontations—but here, now, you would just wake all of your roommates up. A thick but quiet voice in your head mumbles that Dick can hack motion sensors, so you should give him a call, only you realize you've said it to yourself out loud and Dick hasn't returned your last three calls.<p>

You're giving him the rest of the week. Then you don't know what you'll do, send a search party or something. Your team has two leaders now—what you can't coax out of one you can beg out of the other. You worry that Barbara has known him too well to know him now, that maybe he shouldn't be left alone for this (the Bat way of mourning and yours are not compatible. At least in theory. And ideally you would have never come to be well-versed in either). You wonder if she would be the one to say no and Kaldur would have to say yes, but you won't ask anything of Kaldur, not for a hundred years. No matter what he says. You'd hold doors open for him if they weren't all automatic—you'd lay yourself down in the street over puddles for him if his feet weren't so at home in water. On some cosmic level, you'll be making up for your transgression for a long time; it just confounds you how little you can do.

You hit a wall. Not in your thoughts—that comes after—but outside of you, with the entire left side of your body. Your cheek goes flat against icy sheet metal, shoving your eye shut. Graciously you close the other, let yourself hang there and hum with an attempt at contentment. But you slide an inch down the wall and your body bounces to attention, startled by the sudden feel of falling.

You're tired. You hover uselessly down the hall, and now aimlessly, too, as you realize you've lost track of where exactly in the Watchtower you are. This is _not_ the floating rock in space that you signed up for. Your eyes tear up as they're tugged out through the massive window to your right and towards a big blue marble swathed in wispy clouds. It's just like the view from the poster above your old bed.

Your new home was not built for you, not that your old one was anything more than a repurposed ex-headquarters itself, but somewhere along the line you got spoiled. Rock walls but metal floors; a more perfect transition from the caverns of Mars, you couldn't have asked for. The doorway with notches scraped in with a birdarang over Gar's head year after year, even the time he grew a giraffe neck (you let him get away with that, but made him sit extra still for the retake). The tables and chairs that grew scuffs and splinters in the plastic. Your kitchen. You miss cobwebs and stains, signs of life creeping in; signs that the air is breathing back at you, passing back and forth through other people's lungs. These days, and in here, everyone seems to hold their breath.

You're tired. It doesn't really matter why, or of what, because half of your head is sloshing around like a dirty wet bag and the other half's still stinging. It's less than comfortable idling about The Official Headquarters Of The Justice League in your pink polka-dot PJs, but you're lacking the concentration needed to shift into your suit. Frowning with effort, you stretch the collar of your shirt into a cape that stops just shy of your knees, just to have something to wrap around you. Your fingers fiddle with the end corners like they're Wolf's ears, and without much more thought the cloth takes on that texture, soft and thick and squishy. You wouldn't mind seeking Wolf out and sitting with him for a while, only you're fairly certain he's at least on Conner's _floor_ and sneaking into someone's bedroom to pet their dog is bad etiquette. Probably. At least when they're in there sleeping. Definitely, if they're your ex.

You turn a corner and make it to the mission briefing room, a vast and gaping wide assembly hall compared to the little hole once carved out of the core of Mt. Justice. The Cave seems so small now, not just because it's now little more than a pile of rocks, though at least partially so. The first attack on it you were around came mere months after you moved in, but you never thought of it as so vulnerable. You and everyone else, for yours and everyone else's sakes, willed it into a sanctuary.

Now you feel smaller, too, skirting the edge of the room to avoid activating anything that would beep or blare. You wonder if a few telekinetic laps around the chamber would get you back to sleep, maybe even soundly for the night—but then someone would find you there, and there'd be questions. Miss Dinah has enough on her plate. When you reach the nearest doorway, you slide right in. You keep going.

You know where you're going. You can pretend that you're wandering, or that you're sleepwalking, or that some supernatural force has gripped your body and is pulling you by a thread, and maybe it has and is—but you know. You take turns left and right, and the hall gets narrower, dimmer. No sounds of trickling water greet you like they used to, just the faint _bzzrrhh_ of technological processes, and for this specific change you couldn't actually be more grateful. If only for tonight. The lights aren't what you're used to either, and as your feet touch down on well-manicured grass coated in artificial dew, your eyes dart down and flutter underneath fluorescent weight. As if hollowed-out underground rock could be darker than a view of the vastness of space. Perhaps you already knew that.

You pick out the sight immediately of Conner's back bathed in bright, cold light. Your skin breaks out in chills underneath your blanket-cape. It doesn't matter that the four bodies hovering across the yard are bigger than his, or that you can see through them, but not him. It doesn't matter that a muscle shirt and baggy sweatpants are not the clothes the League would immortalize him in. You just woke from one nightmare, _you're tired_, and you forget.

The sob that erupts out of you turns your stomach over, spins it into flips under your skin and up through your ribs, and makes Conner jump in place on his feet. He whips his head around to meet your eyes, looking as bewildered as you feel and maybe even more _alive_—and it registers with you, finally, that the light is projecting itself onto him from Wally's hologram, tingeing his skin and smothering the white of his shirt in electric blue. As in, not coming from him. You regard the bare feet anchoring him to the ground.

Your own toes squeeze tight around little slips of grass. You feel your mind float up out of your head in one smooth, fluid motion; you blink hard to yank it back in. _Think, think!_

"Ah… ah-tchoo!"

You rub your nose. Your hand tips back to block your reddening cheeks from view. The authenticity of your sneeze pleases you until you remember something you read, that on a reflex when humans sneeze they typically close their eyes—and then you grin a little wider to compensate, try to get your mouth to curve instead of just push lips off your teeth.

"Hey."

Your mouth snaps shut, and only then do you achieve the curve. Weight shifts between your feet, your hips. You sway slightly to the left. "Hi."

Conner doesn't smile back, but a nod gives the same effect. If your legs had minds of their own, they'd be hesitating, too, but you're the only one in your body thinking as your body walks you towards him.

Passing Tula makes your pace slow. Not Tula—the image of Tula, the projection of Tula's image from the hologram stand. Not even a ghost. Not Tula. _Not Tula_. You shake your head, knocking something wet and heavy back and forth behind your eyes until it breaks apart, gets washed away.

Conner watches you settle on a spot a whole person's width away from him. You only know from a brief glance over to him that he's staring, because your eyes keep springing back to a different face. Maybe you're just making room. "Couldn't sleep?" he asks, and your left ear registers his voice while you still try to work the straight-line mouth on Wally's hologram into something truer to life. Just in case you're lucid dreaming, you could at least make it look right in your mind for as long as you're still asleep. The light flickers on and on, unchanged.

You shake your head. "I woke up." _Same difference_, you think, chiding yourself for not simply saying "no." Or "yes." Or whatever the proper word would have been to express that he guessed right. You turn your head to him. "You?"

He cranes his head up towards the hologram, eyes picking up your slack as if the memorial is a sacred fire needing perpetual attention. "Never slept a lot," he says, not quite as if you don't know, but as if he thinks you need reminding. You jump the gun with a vague "mmhm" that overlaps his next words. "Figured I'd come down here. Uh—over here, I guess."

You're not the only one still dizzied by your new distance _above_ the earth, it seems. Your throat clogs up. "Me too," you croak out. Then you clear it.

"Actually I, uh—" His eyes widen on you again as if he'd already forgotten you were there. A hand goes to the back of his neck, rubbing the slight, small hump of muscle there, a contour your fingers spent five years tracing. Both of your wrists twitch. You pull your arms behind your back, but keep them under your cape. "—Went to the _Grotto_ a few times when I couldn't sleep, back when… _back when_."

"Really? I never knew."

He sighs. "You wouldn't've."

"_Ah_." You drop your head. The time clicks in with the place for you: the tiny two-and-a-half month eternity that the Cave still stood without you and he sharing a bed under its roof. _**That**__ back when._

(That was not the order past-you would have expected things to ever come crumbling down.)

"Yeah. Never liked it. These things remind me of pods. Like they're trapped in there or something." Whether by sight or by sound, you're not sure, but in your own throat you _feel_ him swallow. "Guess it's better than nothing, though. No… monuments to them, I mean."

"It's the faces, you know?" comes spurting out of you. "It's like I'm waiting and waiting for them to—to just _blink_. I always forget they wouldn't hear me if I spoke, which is silly, since if they _were_ really here I'd be able to sense their minds."

"No heartbeats either," Conner supplies. "I know. They can't hear you." His hands have no pockets to hide in, but his arms still start the gesture, and he tugs at the hem of his shirt instead. You pull your strange cape up around your folding arms like a shawl, clench your fingers around one fistful of it. "Or if they can, they're not talking."

"Have you—" You run your tongue along the indent of your quickly-closed lips. Your mind catches up to your mouth just a little too late for you to keep it shut. "—ever? Talked… to them… I mean."

"I" and "uh" tangle themselves into a hybrid cry out through his mouth, signifying distress either way. Your cheeks flare up, and you feel fabric pucker at the base of your neck, a hood pushing at you to be birthed. You swallow hard to force down the squirming feeling in your spine. His hand goes back to his neck. "…Yeah."

_Oh_. You blink. "Oh."

"S'kinda embarrassing. 'Specially now. Maybe."

"I—" and you're gutsy now, suddenly, a rush of butterflies up through your veins and out of your stomach—and on a fuller night's sleep they'd be asleep too, in you, and you wouldn't even be here, with him, like this, so why not—"_I_… am pretty okay at keeping secrets. At least I try."

You wouldn't blame him for laughing at you even if you weren't already laughing at yourself. But you chuckle and he chuckles and then you _snort_, and you think him laughing with you and you laughing with him is better. _Together_ is a word too strong and too fragile to cross your mind now, so it doesn't. He "hmmm"s an end to his laugh and you "ahhhh" an end to yours. The pulse of the room dulls down into a space between two heartbeats.

"Artemis."

Your throat goes dry. The name thrums a string in your head, spurs recollections of all the descriptions of hangovers imparted to you over the years. Your brain starts to spin on its axis in one direction. Your stomach takes the opposite.

"Before I knew it was a lie. I'd go down there to see her."

"_What?_" You wring as much voice out of your throat as you can, straining to speak above a whisper. "…Did you talk to her about, I mean."

(The first thing _she_ said to _you_ while the truth was still sinking in, you'll never forget. You kept repeating and repeating it, asking it of yourself, trying to force an answer out of yourself that she could not because _interrogation_ was your specialty.

_**M'gann, what have you done?**_)

Your cape shifts into a thick flap of faux-leather, bearing new weight down on your shoulders with a _thlup_. You run some fingers along its base, keeping one arm folded around you.

"Not a lot." You have no hope in finding the exact star, the single exact tiny spec among thousands, that his eyes are focusing on—but you hate hopeless situations. You still try. "I never really said much. You'd think it be easy, but no."

"I don't think it'd be easy at all."

His eyes dart to you, and yours dart away, pinballing their way through unmapped constellations. Another swallow-feel, and you must be imagining it, like you're still too used to your psyche sensing when he's about to speak. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch him look away. "Yeah?"

"Uh-huh. You could just talk and talk forever and never know if what you're saying could be doing any good. If it's making anything right. So how do you say anything at all? But you have to get it out." You flick, swish, direct thoughts with your hands. "Where do you start? 'You died, and I'm sorry'? 'I'm sorry you died'? 'I see you in my dreams but it's not you'? Ah—"

You pop a hand over your mouth, stifling a gasp. But your breathing quickly slumps into a yawn. You don't fake it.

"…Dunno. Sounds like you've got some ideas, though. All I ever got out was 'Hey.'"

You sigh, letting your hands drop to your sides. Gravity spins in you, sticking to odd places in your chest. Heaviness surrounds your heart but doesn't fill it, leaving your pulse bouncing weightlessly against ceilings and walls of your body like a balloon. Your eyes start to sting. "At least I got to find out, to know that she was really alive. I'm sorry you had to—" _Mourn_ feels acrid on your tongue. "To—" You stare down at the green grass, gaining and losing the lines where your feet begin and it ends. "To think otherwise."

"M'gann."

"Yes?"

"That was two days you knew and I didn't. And _you_ were the one that told me."

"Oh." You thread fingers through your bangs and pull at your scalp to try to activate more of your mind. There are more conventional ways, but you're tired. "That's right, isn't it. _Whoop_, heh heh."

_Don'taskdon'taskdon'taskdon'task_, you repeat inside your head, where he can't hear you. The novelty of that concept won't ever truly be lost on you. _Don't ask if I'm okay_. You don't care that it's presumptuous of you to even worry that he cares. _Don'taskdon'taskdon'task _is becoming your mantra_._

"…That's what I wanted to say, though. What you said."

"'She's really alive'?"

"No—well, _yeah_, _that_, if I could've. But not that. If she'd really been dead and could've heard me…" His voice takes on a soft roughness, like scuffs on gold. The contradiction endears it to you, as it always has. The room swells into smallness just beyond the fringes of your hearing. The shifting of weight back and forth between your feet finally pushes you into a step closer to him. "I would've wanted to say sorry."

_Me, too._ "Ah."

He looks at you, and you look back at the ground. "Yeah, guess now we know why we _really_ had her back for that mission, but at the time I just kept thinking, 'Why didn't I say no? Why didn't I see it was a bad idea?'"

_Me, too. Me, too. __**Me, too**__. _You smile in spite of yourself, rubbing your arm around a spot on your arm just below the hem of your sleeve. "There's an Earth saying I've heard that goes, 'You're not psychic.' It's a consolation. You couldn't have known."

"I just… missed her, I guess. Wasn't thinking." Light shifts on your left, and suddenly he's closer. "And you're not that kind o' psychic. You couldn't've known either."

"I found out," you say through bared teeth. Your new smile feels sticky-sweet, shooting pain down the roots of your molars. Conner crosses his arms and gives a noncommittal grunt. Even as you sigh through it, your nose keeps its scrunch. Your mind starts to swirl. You pinch the bridge of your nose then close your eyes, accepting the tension that comes rushing to the front of your skull once you let go. It's yours. You earned it.

You've never fallen asleep on your feet before, but as you hold your eyes closed, the thought occurs to you. You imagine falling back onto the grass without a word, letting your skin and all the rest of you blend into it under the blue light without any effort from you. Disappearing for a while, a night, a moment.

Instead, you open your eyes. You don't expect anything to have changed when you do, and nothing has; not you, or the light, or the distance held rigidly between yours and Conner's feet, or the face on Wally's hologram. You push hair behind your ear and breathe.

"What would you say to Wally?"

"Dunno. Been trying to figure that out. I don't think he'd _want_ to be apologized to, not that Artemis would, either. Don't think he'd be that sorry, either."

"I—" Hot tears from Artemis's cold face run memory down your arms in sudden streaks. "Uh—" Old sobs pound at your heart like new, and you still remember whispering against the sound, only to and for yourself, _"I'm sorry, I'm sorry"—_holding her with dirty hands you were trying to wash in her grief because another version of you could have_ learned_ about the drones before that day, but you shredded that self up when you tore Kaldur to pieces, just like you should have. "Uhm—" The kicked-up ice flakes, clouds of cold smoke, are still just starting to clear when you play it back in your head; you're still squinting to find three figures standing strong where that whirlpool of light had quivered and collapsed, and _"They did it!"_ is still poised to come flying out of your chest. _It wasn't a lie_, you remind yourself, despite how it feels. "You're right. He'd do it again in a heartbeat."

Conner smiles. "Faster than that."

You smile, too, and yet your skin gets hotter and hotter, burning your eyes and throat. "You're right. He_** is**_ Wally." There's a _glug, glug_ sensation just below the surface of your head and chest, pressure building faster than before, and you breathe hard to keep yourself from spilling out of your bones. "I think we all would, though," you add, your voice wet and shaky, "and that… scares me. Sometimes."

"Yeah," Conner replies, his voice suddenly too weak for you to lean your resolve on, and you don't need to hear him say, "We keep doing it, too," to know the words are true. You barely hear them anyway over the rushing in your head, the swish-and-_snap_ of your cape and the brushing of your soles against grass as your feet carry you away, fire you off from the spot like a gun. You move two steps into the ring of light surrounding Tula's hologram and let yourself drop into a seat on the ground, but can't look up, can't pry your hand away from your face. It doesn't matter that you know that she can't see the mess that it is.

He follows you over like you suspected he would. Even with your eyes shut to blackness, you know by the squish sounds in the grass and how close his voice suddenly is, the soft yet clear _thud_ against your eardrums. "_Hey_."

"I'm okay." Your cupped hand casts your voice out strangely, both muffling and echoing it.

"You're crying."

"_I'm okay_." One long _sniff_ later, you're wiping your cheeks. "That's not a lie, you know. The two _aren't_ mutually exclusive."

"Yeah…" he sighs, exasperation clear in his tone. "I know."

"Sorry," you say, and if he asks _for what_, you won't be able to specify. Your eyes ease over to him only to find he's much closer than you thought, seated inches away—and you try to shrink yourself in one of the less conspicuous ways that you know, curving your shoulders inward and drawing your cape up around you.

"That dream you had—" and as you feel your eyes go wide, a stampede of grunts runs through his throat, drowning out the sound of your heartbeat spiking. He leans both elbows onto his knees and looks away toward the trees. "—You kinda mentioned one earlier, and I've… sort of heard you wakin' up the past few nights, I think…"

"Our rooms are close enough." You don't remember screaming, just gasping for breath, though you can't account for what's been coming out in your sleep. You bite back another _sorry_. "Your super-hearing?"

"_Yeah_." (There's guilt fresh on his face. At another point in time you would lean over and kiss every bit of it out of his skin, as you know he would for you. Instead you let him keep his head hung as low as yours for as long as he wants. It's all you can do.) "You wanna tell me about it?"

You lean into the hologram stand, slightly curling against it for support. You prop an elbow up on top of it that you keep close to the edge, lest you affect the projection. The motor running at your side could easily pass as something alive, and you think you feel it thinking, warning you. "It—it's nothing, really. It's not even really a dream, it's… it's just a memory."

"Of?"

"Kaldur's mind" falls cleanly from your lips. You don't smack your hand over your mouth like before; you know there's no shoving the words back in. An old reflex fires signals in your arm for you to smack yourself in the head instead, but there's no violence left in you tonight. You're tired. "_Gosh_." You prop your head up with your hand, fingertips digging into your temple and holding on tight as your head starts to shake. "I was lying. I'm horrible at keeping secrets."

"I know. You're bad at lying, too."

A laugh hurls itself out of you, a shot of clear chaos through your body and mind, and then just as abruptly as it came it cuts itself off. Your cheeks still hold a dull ache as you shut your eyes and sigh. "Well… when Artemis and I got to it, Kaldur's psyche was… in ruins. Specifically, Poseidonis's ruins."

_Artemis's hands go to her throat, and already, you're losing her again. You assure her she can breathe, but really, you're begging her to. You're begging her not to let you make another mistake._

"Before we even found Kaldur, we were attacked. Atlantean magic. It wasn't Kaldur, it was…"

"_Tula!" Artemis screams as the stone still resonates through your kneecaps, your back._

You glance up at the hologram. You know the eyes are staring straight ahead, but with a less logical part of your brain you can feel them glaring judgment down on you. "Not Tula. Not really. But a projection of her. _She_ was Kaldur's mental defense. Well, what was left of it after I…"

_The energy missiles hammer at your skin, trying to tear you open, trying to break you apart. Even when they pass through Artemis, you still feel them bite at your chest, your stomach, your arms and legs. You still let them. _

You rub the space between your eyes, trying to drain away some of the ocean behind them and leave just the bare bones of memory. "Artemis went to go find Kaldur, while Tula focused on me." _The beam shooting into your back is no more real than the water that constitutes it, than the water you're breathing without your gills, but it's __**right**__. This is right. Attacked by your friends. Attacked by the mind you __**destroyed**__. If justice is balance, then it's restoring itself. A shower of rubble comes pouring down on you and you hate the reflex that makes you shield your face, the stubborn shred of self-preservation still clinging to you—once you pull yourself up onto your knees, you hold still. You hold your head in place for the column to come crashing down on your neck. You hold your breath. _

_You wake up gasping your chest off of the mattress, clutching at the juncture of your spine and skull, right where your hair stops—your hands move all over to your throat and face and sternum, checking for breaks and begging the heart throbbing at your core for more breaths because you __**want**__ to be alive, you __**need**__ to be alive, please, please—_

"I didn't… put up much of a fight." _**I thought I deserved it.**_

A shudder runs through Conner's whole body at once, visibly, _audibly_. He grunts as his hands clench into fists. You blink frenetically, brow furrowing as your head lists to the side.

"What did… I just say out loud?"

"You thought that in my head."

"Oh no. Oh, _nonononono_." Your body springs onto its knees and shoves itself backward, only to drop you back onto your butt. You scoot yourself even further away, pushing against the ground with the heels of your feet and breaking through the grass to soil. "I'm—!" Wet chunks of earth squish into your palms. "I'm sorry! I didn't—even realize, I—" _Forgot. _Your eyes scan him frantically, hoping for no sign of that last word having slipped out of you.

"M'gann—" Conner puts up a hand towards you, and whether it's by the angle of his wrist or simply the circumstances, somehow you know better than your instinct to reach over and take hold of it. "—I get it. You're tired."

"Y-_yes._" Your voice quickly dies off into a whisper, just a breath with coincidental meaning. "_Sorry_." Of course, he can still understand it.

"…It was an accident," Conner replies, stiffening his posture and dropping one knee onto the ground. You wipe your hands on your thighs, draw both legs up to your chest, and curl the rest of you around them. Your chin fits neatly in the gap between your knees. The light from Tula's hologram oscillates in subtle waves, like water that can't quite sit at rest, around both you and him.

"She deserves better," you say, bouncing your head in place with your jaw but restoring a certain degree of strength to your voice. Your fingers twist a blade of grass left and right, careful not to pluck it. "Tula, that is. All that's left of her is her memory, and I just keep thinking about some imagined version of her. A _wrong _version of her. _Kaldur_ doesn't even remember her being there; by the time he started being himself again, she was gone. _Artemis_ understood it wasn't real, and I do, too—it just—felt real. Maybe I wanted it to be." You pick at a dry patch skin on your lip with your teeth, scrunching up your face. "_Like you just heard_."

Conner stares hard at some point between you and the hologram stand, and you put your hand away, wrapping it in your cape and hiding it against your chest. He shakes his head, and you place it back down on the ground, but keep it covered by the fabric and perfectly still. He shakes his head again. "I'm just thinking." You expect him to leave it at that, but then he cranes his head upward (and instead of following his eyes, your eyes get fixed to his toes, of all things). "There's more left of her than that. Her _and_ Wally—" You look up, and he looks back at you, and because it's by pure chance that his eyes and yours connect, you hold tight to his gaze. "—They both saved the world by doing what they did, when it needed it. It's still in one piece because of them."

"The _world_ is what's left of them." You don't think it before it leaves your lips. With your mouth hanging open, you're not even sure it really does. But Conner doesn't grimace, and that's a sign. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth instead.

"That's better than I would've put it."

You drop your head onto your knees, forehead first, bangs blocking your eyes from the light and Conner's view. The heat steaming into your cheeks and temples is more than just your breath. "Great," you say, along with or _despite_ tears, you're not really sure. "Someone _else_ we can't apologize to."

"Then I guess we got nothing to say." His voice tugs your head upward. Light sticks to your eyes in little flakes that you blink away as you watch him settle onto two feet. Your view from the ground grows him larger than the holograms, takes his shadow and stretches it out over the lawn, marking his existence there. Your own shadow does the same as you stand and brush bits of grass and dirt off the back of your shorts. He doesn't offer a hand to pull you up, so you don't take one. "Let's go."

A weight drops in your head as you take your first steps towards the exit. A fuzzy feeling spreads itself through your toes and to your eyes, like little spores touching down onto all the right spots inside of you. The trees turn thicker, darker, inviting your temples to press into them, but you keep walking. You might be wandering. You're not sure if you're following Conner or if Conner is following you, or neither of you are following the other and your matched paces and direction are coincidence. It doesn't seem to matter very much to you at all. Neither does your destination. Your earlier reservations about falling asleep out on the floor somewhere have slipped out of your mind as you've walked, like coins from a hole in your pocket.

You and he reach a lounge that you might not have even known existed before now, before you were halfway across it. A dark green sofa hovers in the center of your vision like an oasis—and if you're hallucinating it, you're not the only one, because Conner hasn't stopped you. It's a near match for the sofas from the living room of the Cave, so you still might be, and if he lets you plop straight down onto the floor you won't blame him. You'll probably laugh. But as you come up close upon it you can see the leather is lacking significant rips and dents, any clear signs of use. You press your knee into a cushion and give it its first. Your cape settles over your back like a blanket, runs itself down to your feet.

"Thank you, Conner," you call out, pushing your voice out louder than the mumble your heavy lips want to make of it. He's still standing near the entryway as you close your eyes, plant your cheek into the sofa's arm. You have no qualms, no guilt about leaving him alone the rest of the night—after the roller coaster you ran him though tonight _alone_, he deserves the peace and quiet. "For talking to me. I…"

_I missed it_ hovers on the brink of your lips, but before it can tip over into speech, your mouth stretches into a wide, round, clumsy shape. You pull your hand up to your face to cover the end of your yawn then set it beside your face, letting your skin brush against itself. "…Sorry. I'm tired." Your lips patter shut with little wet clicking sounds.

"Me, too." You can't tell how close he is now. Your mind is just tinged some vague awareness that he spoke.

"Ah. No wonder you were so talkative tonight."

The sound of him laughing is like a sip of carbonation; little effervescent bubbles find their way up your nose. They drift down to your ribs and tickle them as they pop, sending light kicks through your feet.

The sound and sway of leather creaking opens one of your eyes, then the other. You lift your head enough to peer over to the opposite end of the sofa. Conner settles into the corner, folding his arms over his chest and perching his feet on the edge, _just_ managing to leave some of the space you left, too.

"Hmm?" You rub your eye, wiping away the tears leftover on your skin.

"Wolf stole my bed."

"_Hmm._" You lay your head back down and smile. Your cape stretches its edge out further and further away from you, opening itself up wider and wider, swallowing up your fingers and toes; by the time it's finished, he could tuck himself underneath it without pulling on your neck, if he wanted to. A foot brushes against yours underneath it, and the warmth runs through channels all the way up to your cheeks.


End file.
